


Managing

by Canaan



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Angst, Character Study, Dark, Dubious Consent, M/M, Self-Harm, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-01
Updated: 2011-04-01
Packaged: 2017-10-17 10:49:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/176091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canaan/pseuds/Canaan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS has nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Managing

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kink_LAS round 1, challenge 6 on LJ, but this is the director's cut--the story really needed more words than were allotted for the challenge. Not part of any of my existing continuities, and I consider it a mild AU--essentially canon-compliant, but probably a bit darker than played in canon.
> 
> BR by Yamx, and a big thank you to all the people who were good enough to offer critique on the first version over at the challenge feedback thread. Disclaimer: RTD and the BBC own all.

It was a good day, as these things went. Not the best--they didn't manage to save everybody. But still good. A lot of happy, smiling people wanted them to join the impromptu feasting as they celebrated their escape from the Verslian outriders. The Doctor would have bowed out, but Rose and Jack wanted to stay for the dancing. He thought they could use a bit of a holiday, so he gave them a few hours.

Jack was grinning like a fool (though the lad was on his best behavior--his flirting wasn't so outrageous it caused trouble, and he hadn't drunk enough to matter) and Rose all but glowed with a surfeit of good cheer by the time they returned to the TARDIS, which was always good to see. The Doctor patched up Jack's scraped elbow and saw them to their rooms, grumbling a bit about not waiting for them in the morning if they overslept.

When Rose finally closed her door, the silence reverberated inside his head and out. He could feel it waiting for him, ready to whisper at his mind like a phantom limb, taunt him with the echo of faces at the edges of his vision, sit on his chest and squeeze the breath out of him if he were foolish enough to lie down and surrender to sleep.

It had been a good day. He wouldn't let it end like that.

He wouldn't.

***

  
The TARDIS wasn't the first sapient or semi-sapient ship Jack had met, but she was the first he'd known to have nightmares.

He'd learned to recognize them. He could hear sobbing--or maybe screaming--in the hum and pulse of her. Lying in bed with his eyes half-shut, he'd watch the gold-green glow of the emergency lighting drift toward sickly chartreuse and throb nauseatingly.

Thank god Rose seemed to be a sound sleeper.

Tonight, it drove him out of bed. He paced the ship's corridors in bare feet and the day's rumpled trousers, fingertips trailing along her walls for comfort--hers or his, he wasn't sure any more. Ten minutes along a passageway with no doors, Jack washed up in a small, womb-like chamber of bare coral.

The Doctor sat on a low-backed coral rise, back and shoulders as relaxed as Jack had ever seen. His small movements and gasps were no real surprise; under other circumstances Jack would have left him to his pleasure, but a captain should know when his ship was in distress. "Hey Doctor," Jack said, his voice low as he padded into the room, "I hate to interrupt, but I think the TARDIS is trying to tell you something."

The Doctor half-spun in place. His startled look was comic; the knife in his hand wasn't. Jack's fingers twitched, but he managed not to reach for his backup weapon. He said, "I know I'm the bearer of bad news, but don't you think that's a little ...." He trailed off as the Doctor's body language sank in: not aggressive, but awkward.

The Doctor blinked and turned away, hands hidden once again. "Jack. Go away." His voice was mild and controlled.

"Not until you pay attention to your ship." Jack circled around so he could see whatever it was the Doctor didn't want him to see. "The TARDIS is--"

Long, thin slices bled across the Doctor's thighs, below his boxers. Jack could see the pale, white marks of older cuts where there were no fresh ones. _The TARDIS is trying to tell_ me _something._

***

  
The Doctor would not be lectured. It was a good day, and he meant for it to stay that way, and that meant sending well-meaning companions back to their beds while he still had his hard-won control. He set the knife down. "TARDIS is fine. _I'm_ fine. Nine hundred years old, me--give or take a couple of centuries, a flicker in the timelines, the death of a thousand worlds." He bent to draw his jeans up, calm in the face of Jack's disbelief, the fire of the denim's rasp on his cuts steadying him as he rose. "I'm not some half-grown pubescent feeling unloved or a madman trying to work up to killing himself. Just ... I need this, and I don't want to have a row over it."

Jack's jaw set stubbornly. Damn. The Doctor knew he could never have explained to Rose, but he'd rather hoped that Jack, with the darknesses in his own past, might understand.

Jack took two steps toward him, seized the Doctor's shoulders fiercely, and kissed him like he'd rather punch him. Shock froze the Doctor for a moment before he growled and pushed Jack away. The force with which Jack hit the wall was darkly satisfying, but Jack just shook himself, glared, and muttered, "The hell," coming back for a second round.

The Doctor's control shredded. He slammed Jack back against the wall, their lips still locked. He was never meant to kiss his companions, and it was almost enough to shake him out of this mood, to remind him that anger was dangerous, no matter how good it felt. Jack shoved back but couldn't shift him. Instead, some unseen maneuver swept his feet out from under him and spilled them both onto the floor.

How long had it been since the Doctor was in a knock-down, drag-out fight? Not in this regeneration, certainly not with someone he had no wish to harm ... no matter how angry he was. It wasn't even _Jack_ he was angry with, and some part of him knew it, same as he knew there was no way a human had any chance against a Time Lord's superior strength and reflexes.

He ended up with his face mashed into the floor, lips and ribs equally bruised. Jack's knee in the small of his back held him in place while human-warm fingers dragged his trousers and pants down. He gasped as pain from the new cuts flashed through him, aware that this was going to be fast and hard and far too much for a body that hadn't done this before and a psyche that was decades out of practice with intimacy of any kind.

Good. He growled and rubbed himself harshly on the floor as he waited. And waited. "Jack?" he asked eventually.

"No," Jack said. Lips brushed the back of the Doctor's neck. He shuddered. "You want it to hurt. I won't do that to you."

The Doctor bucked against Jack's weight but couldn't seem to throw him off. When Jack touched him gently, he flinched like he'd been burned. Slick fingers opened him tenderly and he cursed Jack the whole while: seventeen different languages, and he wouldn't let the TARDIS translate a one. Fingertips found his prostate with devastating accuracy. Pleasure surged through him and the Doctor wept as Jack pulled him to his knees, the tears beading on the sleeve of his jacket like rain and running down a crease in the leather to soak into the floor beneath him.

As Jack pressed into him, sobs wracked the Doctor. He was arse-up on his own floor, vulnerable to another sapient as he hadn't been since before the fall of Arcadia, dizzy with pleasure and crying like his world was ending again, and the sobs were Gallifrey and the Daleks, Romana and Leela and Susan: everything he'd destroyed, everything he'd lost by his own hand, wrenched out of him in wailing cries that only built as he grew lightheaded and tense with need, straining in Jack's arms until a light hand on his cock brought him. The blissful emptiness of orgasm left dreaded silence in its wake, but Jack's panting breaths filled it.

Jack drew away slowly and stretched out beside him, a hand hovering tentatively on his ribs as if afraid to let go entirely. The Doctor let himself collapse to the floor, hissing at the pain in his thighs. He turned his head and looked at Jack. "I'm a right mess," he said in a low voice, uncertain if it was an apology.

Jack hesitated. "Did I make it worse?" he asked.

The Doctor blinked. "No. No, of course not. No way to make it worse, Jack. No way to make it better either, except time, maybe." Maybe.

"The TARDIS sounds better," Jack commented.

The Doctor shrugged. "Glad it was you that woke up, not Rose. She wouldn't ...." He sighed. "You really should go to bed. Humans--sleep half your lives away, you do."

Jack made a rude noise. "I'm not leaving you."

The Doctor raised his eyebrows. "The floor's hard."

"I've slept rougher," Jack said, sliding closer and draping his arm across the Doctor's back.

Foolish. Utterly foolish to be lying on a hard floor in a room that shouldn't exist, just so the Doctor wouldn't be alone. The Doctor swallowed. "Thanks."


End file.
